but I can't find a way to visualize them. Let me explain the structure of the data and also what I want to plot. data contains 12 sub-lists and each one contains 9 elements. The first element, let's say, is the x-coordinate and all the other eight represent percentages. I would like to plot these percentages with vertical lines (something like a histogram). So, at the axis there should be 7.5, 8.5, 9.5, ... , 18.5 and above of every number eight vertical lines (with different colors and indicators 1, 2, 3, ..., 8 if possible) of the corresponding percentages. Any ideas how to implement this?

Note: the colors of the legend are based on the chart colors, I chose GrayYellowTones. For the font sizes, I just map a Style over the respective labels. Finally, to control the boxes sizes, I use SwatchLegend, see the respective info page for more info.

I believe this is spot on. But it will look better if, instead of a sequence of rectangles, each 'colored trend' was represented by a piecewise linear function (basically "connecting the dots"). It amounts to plotting the trends one in top of each other.
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PeltioOct 4 '13 at 14:21

@Peltio: I guess it is hard to say if it is spot on, given the amount of details provided in the OP, for e.g. in this one here you cannot see temporal evolution of a single process clearly, as e.g. in the second bit of VLC's post (ListLinePlots). And this is not saying that mine's better (I was just trying to emulate what he was asking for directly) :)
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Pinguin DirkOct 4 '13 at 15:34

IMHO this approach gives a better view of the temporal evolution of single processes. The chosen approach is much harder to decipher. I am not talking here about implementation in mma, just that this sort of data make it difficult to follow single trends. The approach that I suggest with piecewise lines would make it easier to see when a determined process (color) is shrinking or expanding (and all in a single picture. As a matter of fact I've seen it used in many reports and in my humble opinion can be very effective.
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PeltioOct 4 '13 at 17:45

This type of chart tries to show the distribution of the values in each 'row'. The height of each box is the number of elements that are considered to be 'grouped'. It might be easier to understand using some of the other options. For example:

With the "PointDensity" option, you can see that it's trying to show the changing distribution by varying the color intensity of the background, with the data points plotted (very small) in black. Perhaps the effect is too subtle to be generally useful...

As with most Mathematica functions, there's enough flexibility built-in to allow any amount of specialized graphical treatments:

Since nobody has used this function yet, I will place it here. Your data seems to be organised almost perfectly for ArrayPlot.
First I removed the first column from the rest of the values and added to the axes ticks.
The rest is just displayed via ArrayPlot, with a particular color scale.

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